Since the spring of last year, when the Snowden documents began to support scoops and stories, the media has had a problem: It is hard to depict the places and programs that Snowden’s stories describe.

It may sound simple, but it’s a problem practical and profound. The lack of photographs that even show the government's intelligence agencies mean that the same pictures get used over and over again.

It’s a stock photo provided by the NSA itself. It looks like it was taken in the 1970s. You can download it on Wikipedia.

Once you know what it looks like, you will see it everywhere.

This sameness makes all the stories about the organization look the same (and kind of boring), which affects in turn how they travel in the media ecosystem. A fascinating story with a dull image, alas, isn’t as likely to be clicked or shared.

Crucially, he’s donated the images to the public domain, and made them available on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.

He’s doing this, he says, “expand the visual vocabulary we use to ‘see’ the U.S. intelligence community.” He wants people to know the agencies exist, and to feel civic ownership over them in the same way they feel ownership over their local library.

The Intercept is the first product of First Look, the media organization founded by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar to support journalism about stories like Snowden’s. The Intercept itself, in fact, exists to publish the Snowden scoops. It’s a lean and limited organization, for now, but as Nieman Lab editor Josh Benton writes, it—along with Creative Time Reports, which also commissioned the images—can extend the reach of its rhetoric by donating stock photos to the commons.

Which news organizations should appreciate. News outlets don’t lack photos because the market has failed. They don’t have them because it is hard—onerous, if not sometimes illegal—to take photos of the offices of the NSA, NRO, and NGA.

Take the NSA, for instance. While its office park is open to the public—old spy planes and the National Cryptological Museum are there!—the public isn’t welcome to take many photos on its ground. In fact, most photography is strictly forbidden.

When the artist (and my friend) Ingrid Burrington visited the site last fall, she found this sign:

courtesy of Ingrid Burrington

Photos of the BUILDINGS IN BACKGROUND—in other words, photos of the NSA headquarters—are UNACCEPTABLE. Any photography of the NSA’s offices, therefore, happens on the NSA’s terms, and the agency is free to depict itself as corporate and unremarkable as it would like.

Mass surveillance has an image problem. The visual references commonly used to portray intelligence agencies—screens, servers and sleek glass buildings—don’t suggest an ethics or a rationale to their operations. They don’t suggest that there are even humans involved in collecting information about millions of other humans.

Paglen has solved this problem with a helicopter. And by solving the problem, he’s found a way to smuggle some politics into a portrayal. There are so few photos of the physical offices of the agencies that distributing new ones lets you depict them pointedly. Paglen’s NSA is a little darker, a little more insidious, than the sunny monolithic office building in the well-known stock photo. Paglen’s NSA pic has a different objective than the NSA’s.

Paglen

Paglen’s NRO, likewise (it’s at the top of this post), shows the agency situated next to a highway. It exists: It has office, it has computers, its workers have cars. His image of the NGA tilts toward the same point, showing the lights of homes and cars in the background. These aren’t office parks in the middle of nowhere, Paglen says: They’re real places in Maryland and Virginia, where real people go to work to spy on their fellow citizens.

Trevor Paglen

“One of the quickest ways to make people think differently about something is to change the visuals around it,” Cindy Gallop, an advertising executive, told the New York Times today. “The thing about these images is they work on an unconscious level to reinforce what people think people should be like.”

Though they have decidedly different motives, Lean In and The Intercept are employing the same strategy. When stock photos are widely used in both journalism and advertising, they dictate how we understand stories. Making new images freely available, then, has a slanting power.

It doesn’t make an argument, per se—it does something more powerful. It shapes the arguments that other people can make.

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

The combination of suspicion and reverence that people feel toward the financially successful isn’t unique to the modern era, but reflects a deep ambivalence that goes back to the Roman empire.

In the early 20th century, Dale Carnegie began to travel the United States delivering to audiences a potent message he would refine and eventually publish in his 1936 bestseller, How To Win Friends and Influence People: “About 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.” Carnegie, who based his claim on research done at institutes founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (unrelated), thus enshrined for Americans the notion that leadership was the key to success in business—that profit might be less about engineering things and more about engineering people. Over 30 million copies of Carnegie’s book have been sold since its publication.